ReConceiving Masculinity: Imagining Men’s Reproductive Bodies in Law
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00119 |
| Author | Sally Sheldon |
It is not just women’s bodies which can pose risks to the foetus but also
those of men, with the quality of sperm playing an important role in
foetal health. This article assesses why male antenatal behaviour has
received such scant attention. It focuses on the regulation of liability for
congenital disability and foetal protection legislation and policies, in
order to uncover the received understandings of male and female repro-
ductivity which have informed the law in this area. It argues that these
understandings are predicated upon a particular vision of men’s and
women’s bodies and of a gendered division of labour following the birth
of a child.
INTRODUCTION
This paper has its beginnings in two related observations. First, it is noteworthy
that an expanding and exciting feminist literature which discusses images of
the female body as leaky,1volatile,2and permeable3has provoked far less
comment on the implicitly or explicitly contrasted construction of the male
body as bounded, stable, and non-permeable.4Secondly, it is equally striking
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
I would like to thank Didi Herman, Thérèse Murphy, and Michael Thomson for their helpful
comments on previous versions of this paper.
129
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 2, JUNE 1999
ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 129–49
Re
Conceiving Masculinity: Imagining Men’s Reproductive
Bodies in Law
SALLY SHELDON*
1M. Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)ethics(1997).
2 E. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994).
3N. Naffine, ‘The Body Bag’ in Sexing the Subject of Law, eds. N. Naffine and R.J. Owens
(1997) 79–94.
4However, see C. Waldby, Aids and the Body Politic (1996) who, in her examination of the
body of the person living with AIDS, notes the perceived permeability of the gay male body.
The construction of male and female bodies as opposites is in itself a relatively recent inno-
vation. See T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) for
the argument that we have moved from a one-sex model (where the female body is a weaker
version of the male) to a two-sex model (where the two are diametrically opposed).
* Law Department, Keele University, North Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, England
that a tremendous amount of academic interest in ‘masculinities’ and ‘the body’
has generated very little discussion of male reproductive capacity.5Whilst the
construction of appropriate fathering roles has received attention, it seems
broadly assumed that fathering begins at birth whilst the responsibilities of
motherhood extend far back into pregnancy and even precede conception.6
Perhaps these omissions in the literature are not particularly surprising.
After all, even to talk of male reproductive capacity seems to stray into the
realms of the oxymoronic. Reproduction does seem to be a peculiarly – and
visibly – female activity. It is the woman’s body which carries a pregnancy,
which provides the necessary warmth and nutrition to sustain the foetus,
and which swells to accommodate its growth. By comparison, the man’s
involvement seems insignificant, amounting to nothing more than the ejac-
ulation of a small quantity of seminal fluid. And even this has been codified
in conventional wisdom as primarily a sexual act, rather than a reproductive
one: we are told that whilst women are interested in sex for procreation,
men are interested in sex for pleasure. The biological ‘fact’ of men’s bodily
distance from gestation may explain why, whilst the extent of the role which
men should play in childcare is constantly under debate, there has been little
discussion about readdressing the burdens of reproduction.
Further, and importantly for the purposes of this paper, men’s physical
distance from the bodily processes of reproduction has contributed to an
assumption that the male body poses no threat to foetal health. Because of
the corporeal nature of women’s engagement with reproduction, it is the
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© Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999
5Elizabeth Grosz reports in her own research into ‘sexed bodies’ that she was puzzled to find
that whilst there was a huge volume of literature on the specificities of the female body, that
there was virtually nothing – beyond the discourses of medicine and biology – on men’s body
fluids (op. cit., n. 2, p. 198). The same observation has been made by Thérèse Murphy (T.
Murphy, ‘Nowhere Man: Representations of Sperm in Law’, paper presented at the Social
and Legal Studies Association Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 15–17 April
1998). A very notable exception is Cynthia Daniels’s excellent paper, ‘Between Fathers and
Fetuses: The Social Construction of Male Reproduction and the Politics of Fetal Harm’ in
(1997) 22 Signs 579–616. For a taste of the large literature on masculinities, see J. Hearn
and D. Morgan (eds.), Men, Masculinities and Social Theory (1990); J. Hearn, Men in the
Public Eye (1992); D. Morgan, Discovering Men (1992); R. Collier, Masculinity, Law and the
Family (1995).
6The responsible mother is one who actively seeks out and conscientiously follows medical
advice. She will have been vaccinated against rubella in her teens, and will have taken folic
acid in the period in which she was trying to conceive and during early pregnancy. In certain
instances, she and her partner will have had recourse to counselling regarding the possibility
of her child inheriting any genetic diseases. She will have undergone appropriate diagnostic
screening during pregnancy and, where there was any perceived risk of disability, she will
have followed medical advice as to the necessity of termination of pregnancy. The responsible
mother is also one who would not expose herself (and thus her baby) to a potentially toxic
environment. She would not have continued paid employment where this posed any risk to
her foetus/child. She will not have smoked during pregnancy and, if she has drunk alcohol,
she will have done so only in circumspect moderation (one or two units, once or twice a
week). Failure to have acted ‘responsibly’ in pregnancy (that is, in accordance with these
strictures and others set down in an abundant literature) will have exposed her to social
sanction and disapproval.
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